Everybody Knows Your Name Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME

  “This book is like your favorite reality show come to life on the page. Andrea Seigel brings her patented wounded angel noir vibe and fuses it with Brent Bradshaw’s blunt pathos. Together their voices pack a pretty punch. It’s a sexy, funny, and poetic book about reconciling your dreams of the future with the drama of your past. I loved it.”

  —Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, co-screenwriter of Legally Blonde and 10 Things I Hate About You

  “Funny, entertaining, and above all, honest, Everybody Knows Your Name examines the trials and tribulations of ‘reality’ TV, instant fame, first love, and finding out who you are . . . especially when the cameras stop rolling.”

  —Elizabeth Eulbe.rg, author of The Lonely Hearts Club

  “A fun and fast-paced novel for music fans or readers looking for a rock and roll reality romance.”

  —Dana Reinhardt, author of We Are the Goldens

  “You’ll fall hard for these characters. If you’re looking for the humor, wit, and heart behind ‘reality’ TV, it’s here in this book.”

  —Melissa Walker, author of Unbreak My Heart

  “The best voice I’ve read in years. This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, and surprisingly sexy tale of life in front of the L.A. lens. Read it immediately.”

  —Rebecca Serle, author of Famous in Love

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA * Canada * UK * Ireland * Australia

  New Zealand * India * South Africa * China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrea Seigel and Brent Bradshaw

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Seigel, Andrea.

  Everybody knows your name / by Andrea Seigel and Brent Bradshaw.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Teenagers Magnolia and Ford unexpectedly fall in love as they share a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and compete on a reality TV singing competition”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63162-1

  [1. Reality television programs—Fiction. 2. Singing—Fiction. 3. Love—Fiction. 4. Family problems—Fiction. 5. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction.] I. Bradshaw, Brent. II. Title.

  PZ7.S4562Eve 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014024548

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Praise For Everybody Knows Your Name

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Magnolia

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Ford

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Magnolia

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Ford

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Magnolia

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Ford

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Magnolia

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Ford

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Magnolia

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Ford

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Magnolia

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Ford

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Magnolia

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Three Weeks Later

  Chapter 45

  Ford

  Chapter 46

  Magnolia

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Ford

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Magnolia

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Ford

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Appendices

  Acknowledgments

  Dedicated to

  1

  When you’re a teenager, everybody tells you you’re going to change. They say, Oh, sure, maybe you like that stupid singer and that stupid outfit right now, but someday you’re going to look back and think, “What?”

  But then, when you get older, it seems like everybody says you can’t change, like you’ve gotten stuck. It becomes too late. Your personality has run into a wall or something. And that’s why there are so many divorces.

  Anyway, I don’t know at what age you can’t change anymore, but I’m only seventeen, so I want to believe it’s possible that I could turn into someone who’s going to be good on this show.

  We’re supposed to be staying in a mansion in the valley, but last night LA had a freak rainstorm, and all the mansion’s skylights leaked. The producers called us this morning to say, “The carpets are soaked, so we’re going to put the contestants up in a hotel until we get this sorted out,” and my mom said to them, “Really, there’s carpet? In the mansion?” She was expecting white marble floors or something. I told her that I was sure the carpet would be nice and fine once it was dry, just to get her off the phone—she loves talking to the producers.

  Even though it’s still sprinkling, it only took us an hour to get to the hotel, because we live in Orange County and we left after the traffic. Lights are on in every few rooms of a modern gray rectangle on a corner downtown. They make the hotel look like it’s trying to send out some secret code. We drive up to the valet, whose blond ponytail is as high and tight as my mom’s, and for a second it almost seems like the two of them are eyeing each other competitively. She hands him the keys.

  “It’s supposed to be sunny tomorrow,” he says.

  “That’s a relief,” she tells him, and puts up her umbrella for both of us to get under.

  Inside the lobby there’s a DJ with his eyes shut standing behind a huge turntable, playing some pretty loud music for girls who are sitting on the dark pink lounge chairs. It’s Monday night around eight, so he doesn’t have much of an audience. The song he’s got on sounds like what would come out of fish if you could capture the sounds of their mouths opening and shutting underwater.

  I watch my mom taking in the lobby, and you can see all over her face how happy she is to be
there. Some things about her make her seem younger than forty, like the trendy jumpsuit she’s wearing and the twenty thin rings stacked on her fingers and that ponytail and the excitement in her eyes.

  But then the weird thing is that the exact same things can make her seem older than forty when you take them all in together.

  At the reservation desk she says, “I think it should be under her name: Magnolia Anderson? I’m the mom.” She leans forward a little. “We’re with Spotlight.”

  The clerk looks from his computer screen to me, and smiles for the first time. “Our manager briefed everyone on the cast visit. Congratulations. You must be excited.”

  “Can’t wait to get started,” I say. My mom believes in the Secret, that you can manifest things just by saying them about yourself. I think that’s beyond cuckoo. For me, it’s like coooooooo-kooooooo. But I am eager to get started so I don’t have to wait anymore to find out if I’m going to change.

  “Just don’t show your nerves,” he says. “People get very uncomfortable watching people who can’t handle themselves. If you get distractingly nervous, just imagine everyone naked.”

  The show is going to be on TV, so that’s a lot of people. “Everyone in America?”

  He makes a face. “Well, let’s not torture ourselves. Maybe only the thin, good-looking ones.”

  I’ve heard this naked idea before in my life, but I’ve never seriously had to consider it.

  “But you don’t think it’s even more nerve-wracking to make yourself imagine that the whole country has suddenly turned into a nudist colony?” I wonder out loud. “Isn’t that kind of a threatening mental image? To think that everyone isn’t just staring at you, but they’ve also got out their—”

  “Okay,” my mom interrupts, smiling at the clerk. “Let’s not overthink it, my love.”

  “Maybe you should just get her some Xanax, Mom,” the clerk jokes as he goes back to encoding our room key cards. He asks me, “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen, oh yeah. Now’s the time you want to learn how to go through life without being so neurotic, or it will catch up with you. I have friends who are so, so neurotic. They’re messes.”

  “You think I’m neurotic?” I ask.

  “When Magnolia sings,” my mom butts in again so that this guy doesn’t have to answer my question, “she completely gets out of her own head. It’s pure. You’re going to be so moved that you won’t be able to stop yourself from picking up the phone to vote for her.”

  “I have a TV, but I only watch films on it,” the clerk says, handing over our key cards. “But I’m sure that’s true.”

  2

  The clerk has put us on one of the top floors. When the elevator door opens, there’s a woman backed into the far corner wearing a tight gold minidress. The straps have fallen off her shoulders, and she’s got her face toward the elevator wall, so all I can really see of her is her long red hair.

  “Are you getting out?” my mom asks, and the woman just says, “Mmm,” which makes it pretty impossible to decide if that’s a yes or a no. So my mom and I look at each other and then at the woman, who isn’t budging, and then we get in, figuring she’s at least willing to go on another ride.

  The elevator starts with more of a jolt than I was expecting. I lose my balance, and tip over onto the panel with the buttons, which means that my shoulder lights up a bunch of floors we don’t need. My mom laughs at me and raps, “Errrrybody in the elevator gettin’ tipsy.”

  At this, the woman in the gold dress rolls along the wall so she’s facing us. She’s somewhere around thirty, and if I wasn’t sure before, now I can tell she’s completely wasted.

  “You shouldn’t play around in an elevator,” she slurs. She stabilizes her head and eyes enough to shoot us an amazingly exasperated look that says we should know better. “Can’t be doing that, thinking the ’vator is your own house, you know, jeez.” She huffs out that last word like she’s proud of the points she just made. The elevator door chimes and opens on the third floor, courtesy of my shoulder.

  “Are you—” my mom says, and I think she’s going to finish with something like, in need of a stomach pumping? But before she can get out the rest of the question, the woman in the gold dress lifts her head higher and asks, “Dooya recognize me?”

  The elevator starts again. My mom takes a step forward like she does whenever she’s charged with excitement and can’t help herself.

  “You are! I loved you in that movie where you play the girl who’s torn between the guy you think is trying to kill you and the policeman who’s been protecting you. Whenever it comes on cable, I’m going to watch it and I don’t care if it’s three in the morning!”

  “That one,” says the woman, chuckling and tucking her hair behind an ear. “A good one, that one. He was always saying, let’s go on vacation, come on, let’s go see palm trees. I can’t get enough of you in a bikini. Listen, I want you. In a bikini. On the inside of my eyelids.”

  Listening to her, I wonder if I should picture everyone in America in bikinis instead while I’m singing. They could be tossing each other beach balls, riding boogie boards, things like that. Boogie boards are automatically stupid things to think about.

  “Which costar?” my mom asks. “The killer or the policeman?”

  “Wasn’t a killer in real life, ya know.”

  The elevator opens to no one on the fifth floor.

  “Obviously. But he was so good in the movie.” My mom nods thoughtfully. “The two of you together, it makes complete sense.”

  “It sure did. Only once, though, way back then,” says the actress. “It only made sense once.”

  By the time the elevator gets to our floor, the actress isn’t the same person who was scolding us for messing around. She’s eager to tell my mom trivia from the set, but the information’s like a puzzle you can only finish partway because some of the pieces are lost in another box. Either it was the director who wore a wig or else it was the guy who made her wigs for the movie who fought the director. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to matter to my mom, whatever the story.

  “Were you outgoing when you were a kid?” I suddenly ask the actress. I’m wondering if she always wanted to get out there and perform for others, or if it was something that snuck up and surprised her.

  She looks at me like I’ve startled her. She says, “Areyoo asking if I was a slut?”

  In this situation, I think most moms would probably warn the drunk actress to cool it toward their daughters. But my mom says to her, “Obviously you weren’t.”

  The elevator doors open on eleven. “This is us,” I say to the actress. “Do you want me to push a button for you?”

  She points upward. She’s forgiven me. “Going to the roof. There’s a pool. There’s stars.”

  I push that button for her, and we say bye, getting out. The actress is saying something about how people should never horse around in the pool—never—as the doors shut on her again.

  “She was pretty cool, even if she was sort of out of it,” my mom says as we walk down the hallway. “Maybe she’s staying here and we’ll run into her again. Because I don’t know if it counts as meeting someone if they don’t remember you.”

  “You still got to talk to her.”

  “Technically. But I feel like it doesn’t matter unless you actually made an impression. People must come up and talk to her all the time.”

  “Maybe they don’t, especially when she’s like that.”

  My mom still seems disturbed by the way she left things with the actress, so I ask, “Do you want to go up to the pool and try to have a longer conversation? I’m fine by myself for a while.” I want this experience to be everything my mom needs from it. If it’s too late in life for her to really change, then at least I don’t want her collecting regrets.

  She shakes her head.
I think it’s more to shake herself out of the idea of going up there than for my benefit. “No, stop it, I’m fine. Here we are.”

  She pushes the key card into the reader, and we enter the room we’ll be sharing for the next couple of nights, or however long it takes to seal skylights. The two beds are on low gray platforms with lampshades attached to the wall behind them. Then there’s one more floor lamp that’s just a glowing white tube.

  The room feels like it’s futuristic and old-fashioned at the same time, like it’s a bedroom on a private airplane, but an airplane from a few decades before I was born. The airplane of a swinger. I don’t actually know what a swinger likes in terms of decoration, but from the ideas I have about swinging, this seems pretty right.

  The weirdest part is that there’s a glass wall in between the bedroom and the bathroom, so you can watch someone washing their face. Or even worse, if you’re staying with your mom, you can watch someone shower. But thankfully, there’s also a white curtain you can pull shut.

  My mom says, “Look, Mag, flowers and a note.” Over on the built-in desk that runs along the window there’s an arrangement. It’s very tropical-looking with green and yellow orchids in a tall bamboo vase.

  The only other time in my life I remember getting flowers was when I was little and my dad gave me a bouquet of carnations after my dance recital. He told me that you give roses to women and carnations to girls, and that’s why he loved carnations. Because he thought they were happier flowers in that way.

  “Thoughtful,” I say.

  My mom takes the note out of the envelope and reads, “‘Welcome, Magnolia and Diana.’ I’ll have to let them know that I go by Di. ‘We hope you’ll find your room comfortable until we can get you into the mansion—sorry about the last-minute change of plans. Please feel free to order room service on our account. A producer will be calling tonight to make sure that you have everything you need and to go over the schedule for tomorrow.’”

  She touches one of the orchid’s petals like she’s making sure it’s real. “Okay, then I’m going to hop in the shower before they call.” She starts taking off her rings and putting them next to the vase. Then she goes into the bathroom and checks out the minisoaps and mini-shampoos before calling out, “Mag?”